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clippings. These come from assorted newspapers, all illicit, all read furtively, all filched from airports or railway stations or newsagents or from recycling bins in various towns.
    Her folder has separator title pages, each title clipped from headlines and stuck on with cheap white glue.
    Republic of Texas .
    Republic of Canaan: a history of the secession of a Bible-based Confederate county in upstate South Carolina.
    She has made a new title page: Republic of Outer Barcoo, Queensland, Australia. She cut that headline from the Sydney Morning Herald and so far the only article in the folder came from that same issue of the Sydney paper. There is photographic documentation (fuzzy and inconclusive) and the investigative reporter claims that large caches of weapons exist on a number of cattle stations and that there are widespread rumours of sedition, of revolution, of covert intention for sabotage and for violent secession from both the State of Queensland and the Commonwealth of Australia. A spokesperson from the premier’s office says that the situation is being monitored but that no one takes too seriously the ravings of a small lunatic fringe. Yes, they are heavily armed and dangerous, but they are few. In the event of siege, they would be wiped out in a matter of hours.
    Behind the Republic of Texas title page in Jodie’s scrapbook, item one, is a New York Times piece dated 13 February 2005, filed from Overton, Texas.
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    The road to the capitol, Jodie reads (though she knows this piece almost by heart), winds through a landscape of pine trees, rusting pump jacks and a few tidy churches in this East Texas town. Literature in the lobby describes how citizens can apply for passports or enlist in the interim defense forces. The building is the headquarters of the Republic of Texas, a sometimes militant organization whose members repudiate the authority of Austin and Washington and believe Texas should be a sovereign nation. The group gained notoriety eight years ago when some members took a couple hostage in the Davis Mountains of West Texas, and endured a week-long siege by more than 100 police officers, after which a follower who fled into the mountains was killed. The leader of the faction involved in the stand-off is still in prison.
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    Jodie has only vague memories of the shootout since she was four at the time. This is how she remembers it: like cowboys on TV but sticky. The sticky was blood. From before that, she remembers the beat-up truck and the road that went on forever and the pillows on each side that her pa put there to stop her from sliding across the front seat of the cabin. She remembers sirens behind them and the trees rushing by very fast and the seatbelt she chewed and the way her pa kept promising, promising, promising. ‘Leave your country, your people andyour father’s household,’ he kept saying, ‘and go to the land I will show you. Thus saith the Lord.’
    Is it possible she can remember the words so exactly?
    Of course not.
    She knows the words from sermon after sermon preached in Texas and in Outer Barcoo. She knows from his telling and retelling.
    She knows, all these years later, that the truck-and-pillow-and-siren memories are about the frantic flight from South Carolina, the state troopers flummoxed at the Georgia border. Somewhere between Georgia and Texas, or perhaps before Georgia, they seem to have lost her mother, but Jodie has no information on that score. Many times she has rehearsed asking what happened, but each time the words turn into vapour on her lips. They rise, she sees them float toward her father’s ears, but they have no sound. Her father is very good at staying out of prison and out of trouble. He charms people. He makes friends easily and quickly. He has (she has now figured out) friends in all the right places, oil men, cattle men, military men, born-again politicians. Everyone says her pa is a charismatic preacher. Friends become